Prince George's totally missing the (train) boat

One of the diagrams Metro created for the bicycle and pedestrian study shows the anticipated change in residential or employment density from 2005 to 2030 across the system. The most visually evident conclusion: Prince George's County is completely failing to take advantage of its existing Metro infrastructure.

Click to enlarge (PDF).

In the map above, dark green represents areas with a projected net decrease in residential and employment density. Light green denotes small increases, redder colors larger increases up to dark red. Of the suburban areas, Montgomery County is doing the best, with increases around most of its Metro stations and little to no other growth elsewhere, except for the Gaithersbungle site, the large patch of orange west of Shady Grove. Fairfax's growth is more spread out, including BRAC sites like Fort Belvoir, but the greatest increases surround Metro stations and Tysons, which will eventually get Metro stations.

Meanwhile, many of the areas around Prince George's Metro stations are actually declining in residents and jobs. The areas around the southern Green Line and eastern Blue Line look no different from the rest of their surroundings. New Carrollton is slated for some growth, but not Cheverly and Landover. And the growth at Prince George's Plaza and Greenbelt is near, but not at, the Metro stations.

Prince George's County is eager for economic growth, but they've mainly ignored their existing, high-capacity, underutilized Metro stations while building auto-dependent faux-Smart Growth in places like National Harbor and Konterra, or total sprawl in rural areas like Accokeek. The County has assets that counties around the nation would kill for, being so close to a major city with many heavy rail, high-frequency transit stations. It's time to start taking advantage of them.

David Alpert is the founder and editor-in-chief of Greater Greater Washington. He worked as a Product Manager for Google for six years and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He now lives with his wife and daughter in Dupont Circle.

Comments

Good post. Not being in the favored quarter is not an excuse to not plan.

Prince George's has a good hand of cards in many ways. They just seem to keep shooting themselves in the foot over and over again. The lack of planning and walkable urban development around their Metro stations is on such example.

rbton, don't play the race card, you know that has nothing to do with this post. Prince George's county is successful in many ways - this post just seems to point out that the county planners aren't making the best use of their incredible Metro facilities.

Metro is clearly a prize that can really change a community - that's exactly why Tyson's fought their long and expensive battle to get it. Prince George's county has the facilities already there, and it's sort of a shame that they aren't being used for TOD.

Some of the problems exist because the stations were built were people don't go and should have been built in other places. It seems as if they they had a map of the county and throw darts at it and where they fell thats where a station was built or wherever it could get the cheapest land.

Some of the stations such as Morgan Boulevard, Cheverly, Landover and to an extent Naylor Rd & Suiltland should not have been built and a station should have been placed somewhere else where there are more people.

the Morgan Boulevard stations is basically hidden the only time that stations is even remotly crowded is during the morning or when there is a game at Fedex Field the station should have never been built the stations before and after it have several things over it with addison road you can see the station from two main streets central ave and addison road with largo town center its next to a shopping center so it will automatically get traffic and they both have metrobuses that stop there.

With Morgan boulevard there is no way to get to the station besides during the day unless your walking or driving since there are only 2 buses that go there and they are both Monday thru Friday and have horrible schedules; I bet that if one metrobus route went to the station riders coming from bus would triple

With many of the outer stations people are coming from areas by car because of transit does not go there and most of the stations are built where they was never that much of a residential area since most are either built besides/blocks from a major road/ highway that is hard to get around, along already present trains tracks which stop the movement of people via walking or driving or the station was just placed in an area where people don't find it convenient to take the train either because it doesn't go where they want to go or it takes them out of there way and results in a longer ride.

In fairness to PG County they've had an abnormally difficult time drawing the kind of national-brand retail that now anchors an area like Clarendon. Of course it's probably a chicken-and-egg, build-it-and-they'll-come situation. Just to pile on with the metaphors.

Kind of scary, the idea of counties actually killing for specific transportation and infrastructure amenities.

While PG (and eastern DC)desperately needs Metro-centric density, the New Carrollton and Greenbelt Metros are also way under-used considering their importance to the DC/Baltimore/Philly/NY corridor. All they have is a couple MARC trains, an Amtrak stop, and an express bus from Greenbelt to BWI which ties into (arkwardly) Baltimore's light rail.

Along with the Purple line why can't they create a transit hub with rapid rail to Baltimore? It would take a lot of the NE corridor to MD suburbs load off DC.

This is somewhat simplistic. PG lacks the kind of urban design that is enjoyed by DC or rebuilt by Arlington County. And you can see the "failures" of the subway to revitalize DC neighborhoods in the places that didn't have the same kind of urban design and density typical of the core of the city (Rhode Island, Brookland, Fort Totten, Minnesota Ave., etc.).

Note that while the specifics of the urban design are pretty bad, the area around PG Plaza shopping center was designed to take advantage of subway access, decades ahead of the actual opening of the Green Line. (There is an article in a 2007 issue of _On-Site_, the quarterly magazine of the Washington Business Journal about this.)

And the alignments of the subway lines in PG County were chosen in part because of availability of railroad track access, not out of an idea about how to repattern development and opportunity, as opposed to Arlington's inspired choice 40 years ago!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! to move the alignment of the orange line to Wilson Blvd. rather than in the middle of I-66. Note that the green line from Fort Totten to Greenbelt was intended be straddled by I-95 connecting to DC from College Park.

So without super great planning to take advantage of the addition of transit infrastructure, urban design is destiny.

That's the position of PG County today. Ironically, to take advantage of what you suggest, in many locations PG needs to embark on greenfield development of places that are lightly developed, rather than focus on infill development and intensification of improvements in areas that are declining in favor of exurban development.

They are starting to understand this, as it relates to planning around the Purple Line, but they need to move beyond focusing upon the Purple Line, and develop a real transit program for the entire county.

That is part of what was behind my suggestion in 2005 that the DC Alternatives Analysis study consider a Rhode Island streetcar line. (Although now I think it should be light rail.) And the consideration of an extension of the proposed Crosstown Line (Woodley to Brookland) to UMD via Michigan Avenue, Queens Chapel Road, and Adelphi Road). MTA did do a streetcar study for Rte. 1 in the mid-1990s, although there was no link with DC in the planning.

I don't think there is the understanding of these issues in PG County today, comparable to the lack of leadership on transit in many jurisdictions in the region, including within DC.

If you looked at me and Matt's post (Tsarchitect linked to it above) you would see that a large percentage of riders get off at Suitland because that's a major jobs center. So I don't see how that station "should not have been built".

Prince Georges' main problem in WMATA planning was its propensity to choose CSX/Amtrak tracks to route Metro lines as opposed to major thoroughfares that actually have people on them in the interest of saving money. The Orange Line is a complete waste of high-quality, heavy-rail transit and so is the Green Line north of PG Plaza. There have been numerous stories about how Green Line was to run along Route 1 next to UMD but instead is now over a mile away. And some station locations are just puzzling (Morgan Blvd, Southern Ave, West Hyattsville). The only station with any sort of real TOD has been PG Plaza and I think it has partly to do with the design of the station (in a cutting, parking garage on top of the station instead of a big lot surrounding it).

That said, the total neglect of Green Line F route and Blue Line (the two lines that don't parallel rail tracks at all) by Prince Georges' planners is shocking and completely dumbfounding.

I don't understand why people feel this criticism is unfair. PGC has made bad decisions for 40 years and didn't plan for Metro in the best way. Now, Metro takes a look at the trends for 20 years from now and there's still no change. PGC could change zoning laws to prefer TOD, but they've shown no substantial interest.

Just because they're late to good planning doesn't mean they can't start.

In fairness to PG County they've had an abnormally difficult time drawing the kind of national-brand retail that now anchors an area like Clarendon. Of course it's probably a chicken-and-egg, build-it-and-they'll-come situation.

This is very, very true. This in part has to do with national brand retailers perception of the area due to racial demographics, despite the (nationally) high incomes in the area. PG County's average household income is something close to $70k, yet they have extreme difficulty in attracting any sort of retail/commerical/business centers. The economic center of the DC area has always been to the west of DC, and continues to pace further west as the Dulles Corridor develops.

Majority-black areas like Prince GeorgeÂ’s also tend to be discriminated against in the market for commercial investment and economic growth. As a result, black communities tend to have higher taxes and services that are less responsive to the demands and aspirations of the black elite. Isolation from high-growth economic corridors also means that residents of majority-black communities face longer commutes. The affluent bastions of Prince GeorgeÂ’s are outside the beltway to the south and east of the District of Columbia. They could not be farther away from most of the areas of highest economic growth in the metro region: TysonÂ’s Corner, the I-66 Corridor, and the Dulles and Herndon areas in Northern Virginia, and Bethesda, Maryland, all of which are north and west of the District.

and...

Prince GeorgeÂ’s County has a higher median income than neighboring Baltimore County, yet that county has a Nordstrom at its Towson Town Center, while Prince GeorgeÂ’s has no Nordstrom, Lord & Taylor, or Neiman Marcus, much less a MacyÂ’s. The Bowie Town Center, a 100-store, open-air mall designed to provide a Â“Main StreetÂ” environment, which opened in late 2001 to much celebration, is anchored by middle-market retailers like HechtÂ’s, Best Buy, and Sears.

If a Prince GeorgeÂ’s resident wants to experience fine dining, she also has to drive some distance outside the county to get it. Unlike in Bethesda, Reston, Tysons, or the District, there is no Palm, no Four Seasons, not even a HoustonÂ’s in Prince GeorgeÂ’s County. The dearth of eateries, especially at the high end, is such that when the Outback Steakhouse announced plans to open two new restaurants in the county and Starbucks announced plans to open a coffee shop, this was cause for celebration. The CountyÂ’s official website offers a listing of 66 restaurants located in Prince GeorgeÂ’s. A similar listing for Fairfax County offers over 340 eateries. In sum, white suburbanites living in havens of their own can take for granted the simple pleasure of eating out with their families at a nice place in the vicinity that offers some atmosphere and quality cuisine. Prince Georgians cannot.

This underinvestment in Prince GeorgeÂ’s highlights a central weakness of racially segregated communities: a concentration of racial minoritiesÂ—particularly of black peopleÂ—can and often does lead to a decline in access to and influence of dominant institutional actors that shape markets. This is not an apology for racist or ignorant market actors. It is a statement of fact. I have had colleagues in the academic community react angrily or skeptically when I present facts like these. They would like to explain away these unfair tendencies of markets based upon anything other than race. But I am not alone in pointing out these tendencies. Empirical studies show that commercial disinvestment in majority-black communities, even affluent ones, is commonplace.

Prince GeorgeÂ’s County is not unique. The five common assumptions about suburban life do not seem to maintain for most other middle-class black communities. Despite their psychic benefits, there are some difficult issues that need to be addressed in order to make majority-black communities eminently viable, issues that we donÂ’t like to discuss openly. When it comes to where we live, integration may have eluded, failed, or simply been unappealing to many black people. But separation doesnÂ’t seem to be working entirely either.

There are a few government buildings there right next to the station and beyond that?

almost all people going to and from the station are traveling somewhere else not many of those people are in walking distance from that station that means that, the location is a place where not many people reside or have a reason to go to and therefore shouldn't have been built at the current location. The better spot would have been Marlow Heights or Iverson Mall which have more people in the area daily before and after the station was built or further north or south of the present spot than the area around the station excluding the government center.

How would the station be if there was not a government building next door just like the rest of the stations in the area.

The only reason the station gets used as much as it does now is because the government center is next door and all metrobuses around the area go into there.

There are TOD plans for West Hyattsville. The challenge has been putting the plans into place, especially with the city focusing first on PG Plaza and development on Route 1 on the east side of the city. And, also, the fights to keep Washington Gas from building an LNG plant near the Metro station.

AA, while I don't have the information to discuss your line of inquiry, I can definitely say that Prince George's County certainly hasn't done itself any favors either with their lack of planning.

The county is a good 30 years behind Montgomery in planning and doesn't have the legacy form of the L'Enfant City and the earliest suburbs just north of Florida Avenue like DC.

Prince George's needs a whole new generation of elected officials who are capable of getting transit and land use planning. This current crop cares more about grandstanding against anything for cheap political points. (A great example of this sad process was the sorry cheap political grandstanding that led to the decision to not even study the soccer stadium, which proposed no financial risk to them and no obligation to do anything after the study.)

Until a new crop who is interested in how Montgomery or Arlington or wherever planned to have their current outcomes rather than just grandstanding for cheap political points and whining, "why don't we have amenity X?"... Prince George's County will remain a sad example of untapped potential.

When it comes to livable communities, nothing happens without planning. Prince George's doesn't seem to get that and their current batch of elected officials don't seem to care why.

They really need a generational change and to hope that the new blood cares more about planning to get to an outcome rather than grandstanding/whining about why things aren't a certain way.

Agreed. It's also been a failure of PG County leadership, but they have the twin burden of nonvisionary leadership, and the difficulty of attracting retail/commertical development in a region where it is the least economically competitive compared to its sister inner/outer suburban jurisdictions (Montgomery, Fairfax, Howard, Prince William, Arlington, Alexandria, and Loudoun)

As AA wrote, the high income areas of PG lie outside the Beltway. This means that the low income and high crime areas are inside the Beltway. TOD is difficult enough when incomes are low, but the crime scares businesses away. Temple Hills and Suitland have many areas of abandoned retail and offices. It used to have a Hecht's that became a K-Mart and is now a church. Not being able to support a K-Mart is a true sign of poverty. In theory, much of the area around Suitland Metro could be redeveloped into high density commercial and residential areas, but that can't happen until crime goes down.

It, therefore, makes sense for PG to concentrate development along the safer Purple Line.

This map is stupid. It is not well thought out. Does anyone here really think there will be a net decrease of density around Farragut North in the next 20 years? How will Hanes Point lose density? Will it go from 8 employees to 3? Come on.

As for Southern Avenue station, that is such a weird station location. Looking at an aerial photo of the station area http://tinyurl.com/lyht27 it's like the station is built in the middle of nowhere. Valley Terrace is so odd because its like an isolated neighborhood just sitting right across the street from the station. Even into Maryland, there's just a vast amount of land that screams to be developed in order for this station to be successful. I wonder how many people park at this station since its about a mile or so from S. Capitol/Indian Head Hwy. Also, as for Morgan Boulevard, I think they are building homes around the station area. Satellite images vouch for some kind of development going on there.

As far as PG County is considered, I imagine that the African-American communities that fled the blighted District a couple decades after the "white flight" demanded sprawling suburban landscapes like the ones white people moved to in the '60's and '70's. It is a very unfortunate mindset, considering how deleterious suburbanization is for the region and the nation, but I wonder if the notion of condemning suburbanization in southern and eastern Prince George's County might be considered racist my a people who could possibly only want the sprawling estates their white counterparts constructed in Fairfax and Montgomery?

As far as the issues of the inside the Beltway PG County go, it is the same process as everywhere else. (It's explained by the Chicago sociologists who coined the ecological succession or invasion-succession theory about neighborhood change.) First, the core city locations were left for locations elsewhere in the city but further from the core, then the city was left for what we now call the inner suburbs. The inner suburb locations are left for outer suburban locations and then exurban locations.

And so inner beltway PG County has real issues. So did/does DC, but the reintroduction of fixed rail transit led to significant repositioning of what we might call attractiveness for these neighborhoods, and this started a long period of revitalization.

PG has been making all the same mistakes that DC did. DC has been fortunately able to ride on L'Enfant's urban design and the spatial pattern of the city as developed through about 1920. Plus it has the federal buildings, and while agencies continue to leave, there is a great enough critical mass that will keep a goodly number of people residing within the city.

David's comment in today's breakfast links clarifies the intent of the original post, and that's very interesting because it does likely get at the thinking of the PG Growth Machine leadership, which is likely to be expansive in terms of development, rather than having a more intensive (fix the problems we have) approach.

At the same time, PG wasn't given the same opportunity by the development of the heavy rail transit lines, because they are spokes into the city focused on the city, rather than set up in a way to promote PG County. Arlington shows that to make those spokes work for their own needs, they needed to come up with a complementary system of planning, land intensification, and transportation demand management programs in order to fully realize the opportunity that they were presented with.

I call this a lag in appreciation of living in the center city. Many African-Americans still prefer to move out of the city (I covered this in a series of blog entries called commerz in the 'hood in 2006).

This is why the population of higher income African-American households is increasing in places like Charles and Anne Arundel Counties.

At the same time, as DC neighborhoods continue to upgrade, lower income households are pushed into the inner beltway area of PG County. (The Gazette had an amazing article about this in 2004, about the impact on PG Hospital and other social service programs in the county. It's not accessible online though.)

Yeah, I wouldn't go as far as Alex and call this map stupid, but I do wonder about the methodology. What are the assumptions? How do you project development beyond what is already in the pipeline? How much are projections about the state of the economy taken into account? What are the individual polygons based on - zip codes? census tracts? Something else?

I think probably if you blur your eyes and note the biggest trends on the map, it's probably useful. However, looking at the individual little shapes, there are probably issues, like around Farragut North, or along Columbia Pike in Arlington.

Having lived in MoCo for 18 years, then PG for four years and now DC, I've often wondered about the lack of business investment in P.G. relative to other areas. However, to explain it by race doesn't account for the fact that even majority-white communities such as Greenbelt and College Park also lack good retail options.

The lack of investment probably has a good deal to do with the county leadership (or lack thereof), but I can also see how the county itself has an inherent disadvantage as a business location. Think about it: if you want to start a nice or upscale business somewhere in the DC area the location and proximity to customers is highly important. As a restaurant, you know you will have many customers if you open in Bethesda or Clarendon or Dupont. But what if you want to open in Hyattsville? You probably will have customers but such a customer base is not as assured as it is elsewhere.

The success of high-end retail and entertainment is proven in the rest of the DC area, but evidence of its existence and success in P.G. is spotty. The only advantage you have in PG is perhaps the lower rents, but in certain business where location is very important (e.g. restaurants) I doubt the lower rent offsets the risk in a reduced customer base.

Once again, Monumentality, remember that it took 30 years to transform Clarendon from a place with declining strip malls and declining land values to a place with a "built-in customer base." That took years of planning, and even more years of sticking to the plan. Granted, it is in the Favored Quarter, but as we experienced in the 70's, 80's, and 90's, inner places in the Favored Quarter can and do decline in favor of places farther out. For example, the Wilson Boulevard corridor declined in favor of Tysons Corner.

Getting back to Prince George's, they could plan for something like Clarendon. At least they're trying on the northern Green Line. It is 30 years behind though. None of this is somehow fundamental to Prince George's. It is representative of a political structure that is seen as hostile to new investment because, as seen in the stadium non-debate, you never know when a proponent will turn into an adversary just to score cheap political pandering points.

A big piece of the problem is that Prince George's hasn't planned and the elected officials abandon plans too quickly the second they hear some sort of opposition. They also let jealousy of neighbors lose sight of the fact that creating a place that has that customer base requires at least a decade. They try too hard on incredibly costly magic bullets like National Harbor (that required lots and lots of subsidies and incentives from the county before Gaylord would go forward) rather than recognizing the jewels they have like Hyattsville and Riverdale.

I do hope that the experience with fighting for the Purple Line will change this lack of planning. There has been some progress with creating professional walkable urban sector plans in Langley Park and Riverdale. I hope that the success of these projects will create an appetite for more. I also hope that the slow pace of the development around those stations won't make the elected officials overly sensitive to the inevitable naysayers. This is relatively new to them. They see stuff in DC, Montgomery, and Arlington and want some. Of course. They also forget that it took decades to plan Rosslyn-Ballston and Bethesda. It took years revitalize Chinatown and U Street. I just hope that they will see it through.

Plans are in place for TOD, the fact is that the County Council and County Agencies donÂ’t use the land use plans to set priorities or make decisions. Most folks on the council use the land use plans to hand out zoning to developers that mostly turn around and sell the land cashing in on the increased land values. The county council has also steered away from pursuing zoning that matches their Comprehensive Plan or General Plan as it is called in MD. Each Council member has his/her own agenda (in their district) and has a limited interest to improve the county as a whole. M-NCPPC is a weak planning agency in PG and because of their separate nature from the County their plans donÂ’t carry enough weight.

I want to correct Chuck Coleman (post 8/4 732pm): He wrote, "It used to have a Hecht's that became a K-Mart and is now a church. Not being able to support a K-Mart is a true sign of poverty."

If you are referring to the former K-Mart at Branch Ave and St Barnabas Rd, you are correct that it later became a church,and you may have a point that the loss of K-Mart is not a good sign. However, the K-Mart was never a Hechts - the former Hechts at Marlow Heights shopping center is across Branch Ave from the KMart site; it stayed open as southern Prince George's only dept store (after the Iverson Mall Woodies closed) and is now a Macys along with the rest of the Hechts chain. I am told it is a very healthy part of the chain, though I can't vouch for that.

I'd love to comment on the CONTENT of this map because, but as someone who is red-green colorblind, a map such as this with (supposedly) red blobs inside larger green circles is essentially CONTENT-FREE.

I would love it if Metro, other public agencies, and amateur statisticians used color palettes that took this into account. See, for instance, http://colorbrewer2.org/

Brian: Excellent point and one that cartographers need to keep in mind. Washington Post cartographer Nathaniel Kelso made this point about another graphic on his blog.

I didn't make this one, of course, but I just applied a Photoshop manipulation which I believe should make the diagram easily viewable to those with red-green color blindness (making red into magenta):

I hope this makes it possible for you to enjoy this very interesting diagram.

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